This is sort of old news, they had announced this a while ago, but its still very cool. But they won't sell the can bus reader/ decoder as an assembled unit only telling you to buy the parts and wire it up yourself. That is an issue.

You're thinking of the beta toolkits that went to certain developers, mainly at Universities last year. This is the post beta that's now open to all and was released today at CES.

Today, January 10 Ford announced the launch of the OpenXC Program at CES 2013. OpenXC is an API to your car. It works off a small hardware module which reads and translate information from a carís internal network.

OpenXC is a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Bug Labs. What makes this program different from other existing programs is it is open-source and is built with the hobbyist and independent developer in mind. It runs on a combination of Arduino and Android platforms. The code to get started will be released on Github and the Ford team will be monitoring Google Groups to answer any questions.